timmah's brain

The point of this page is to at minimum, get you to stay in touch with the Financial Crisis Investigation Commission, or FCIC, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and/or Tumblr [not an Official FCIC Tumblr page yet].

The FCIC is charged with conducting a comprehensive examination of 22 specific and substantive areas of inquiry related to the financial crisis. These include:

fraud and abuse in the financial sector, including fraud and abuse towards consumers in the mortgage sector;

Federal and State financial regulators, including the extent to which they enforced, or failed to enforce statutory, regulatory, or supervisory requirements;

derivatives and unregulated financial products and practices, including credit default swaps;

Top 3 Reasons you should be curious why Banks were bailed out:

3. Since you are reading this, you apparently don’t live in the woods foraging for food so you need money.

2. You have no clue why Wall Street got trillions to bail them out and you absolutely hate the idea that it happened.*

And the #1 Reason why you should be curious:

1. It will take 3 seconds.
Click on the FCIC’s link for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and/or Tumblr so you let the Commissioners know YOU want to know what the hell happened to your money and you are holding them accountable to tell you!**

What?

Aren’t you curious if this could happen again?
Aren’t you curious where your money went?
Aren’t you curious why?

Curiosity — it’s the most powerful thing you own. ~James Cameron
Wisdom: Roundup of TED2010, Session 12

For you non-econ types who understand what unacceptable risk means.

“American International Group Inc. appealed for its fourth U.S. rescue by telling regulators the company’s collapse could cripple money-market funds, force European banks to raise capital, cause competing life insurers to fail and wipe out the taxpayers’ stake in the firm.”
From Calculated Risk back in March 2009. Note: Today, the risks are higher.

“You can innovate as much as you like, but do it within a structure that doesn’t put the whole economy at risk.”
Paul Volcker from a speech in December 2009.

“[T]he financial services industry continued insistence that it needs to be unfettered so it can continue to “innovate”. This looks like yet another bit of Orwellianism; innovation in the financial services is tantamount to “creation of complex products that let us extract fees and shed our risks in ways the customer won’t understand.””
Yves Smith from naked capitalism.

“If AIG had failed, this was a huge national organization, interconnections throughout the economy. If it had failed, with the System as fragile as it was, I believe it would have taken down the whole financial system and our economy. It would have been a disaster. Today, after all the actions that have been taken, by the US Government, we still have this terrible 10% unemployment level. I believe that if the System had come down and failed, we could easily have had unemployment of, reaching or exceeding the 25% level we had in the Great Depression.”
Henry Paulson, Former Secretary of The Treasury, recent testimony.

“Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car,” Barofsky wrote.
Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General for Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The perverse capitalistic business Magnetar was involved in:

“The hedge fund bought the riskiest portion of a kind of securities known as collateralized debt obligations — CDOs.

The hedge fund acknowledges it bet against its own deals[.]

At the same time it was investing in the equity, the fund placed bets that many of the same CDOs it had helped create would actually blow up.

“Figure out a way to make money and figure out how to repeat it and do it over and over again,””
How a hedge fund created garbage, bet against it, and made hundreds of millions “legally”.

But what can you do?

Stay in touch with the Financial Crisis Investigation Commission, or FCIC, on
Facebook,
Twitter,
YouTube and/or
Tumblr.

Subscribe to News about the FCIC:

Google News using FCIC
Yahoo News using FCIC
Bing News using FCIC
AOL News using FCIC currently has no results.
popurls using FCIC
[popurls is the mother of aggregators]

Spread the word about the need for results & transparency:

Contact FOIA organizations and inspire them to maximize the sunlight on the financial meltdown. The more sunlight and the more people know and are pushing for transparency, the better.

Example orgs:

Virginia Coalition for Open Government
Sunlight Foundation
NFOIC

Some Great Places to Learn More about the Meltdown

All You Need to Know About the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
at new deal 2.0

Financial Crisis for Beginners
at The Baseline Scenario

Credit Default Swaps: The Next Crisis?
Time.com article from March 2008 before the financial crisis implosion in Fall 2008.

* What do you mean trillions?! I thought it was billions! From WSJ.

U.S. household wealth that evaporated during the financial crisis: $15 trillion.
Write-downs at the world’s largest banks: $4 trillion.
Stock market value destroyed as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average: $2.3 trillion.
The price the nation is paying to understand what caused the whole mess: priceless, right?

** What do you mean “my money”? Where the hell do you think the money came from?!